Package "child_process" not found. Have you installed it?

[zxti]

Trying to migrate a large CRA codebase to snowpack (snowpack sounds amazing, though this is my third try in the past year or two to adopt snowpack across large projects). When I run snowpack, with or without polyfillNode: true, I see:

snowpack

▼ Console

[snowpack] ! installing dependencies...
[snowpack] Package "child_process" not found. Have you installed it?

error Command failed with exit code 1.
info Visit https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/run for documentation about this command.

This is caused by some file somewhere in our src, which I can't share. We import child_process various places, but:

• usually not in client-side files, only in tests and server-side code (entrypoint for CRA should be src/index.tsx).
• there's one shared file (by both client and server) that imports it, but it's not used if not running on the client.

The codebase of course works fine in CRA. Is it possible yet to get past this? Thanks!

[rvion]

same problem here.

It's quite unnerving to see snowpack not treating issues appropriately. The whole codebase is very buggy, and it's so hard to want to contribute to this :(

[FredKSchott]

Ironically, contributors pitching in and helping out is the easiest way to make software better and less buggy. Would love your help, please fix some of these bugs that you're finding!

[FredKSchott]

It sounds like you're importing child_process somewhere in a file that's being built by Snowpack. That would fail to run on the frontend, so we're failing your build for you. I agree that this error message could be better.

Snowpack mounts & builds entire folders, so it sounds like there might be a CRA concept here that doesn't map. In Snowpack, files in your src directory will be built and served for the frontend.

[zxti]

What's odd is that I had tested that hypothesis by adding an import from child_process into a blank new CSA, but that didn't fail with this same error.

[FredKSchott]

if you use the --verbose flag, you may get some insights into what's going on here

[Ladvace]

I'm trying to use webpack with electron, is there anyway to "disable" this error?

[FredKSchott]

Yes, setting packageOptions.external: ['child_process'] should make all warnings go away. If it doesn't, that would be a bug :)

[Ladvace]

in which file should i set this?

[karolis-sh]

https://github.com/karolis-sh/electron-snowpack might help you most of the starting questions

[Glenn-Domin]

Did anyone find the answer to this? I can't figure it out based on that link or the documentation.